Hundreds of thousands of Iranian students unable to continue school

While
the Iranian regime from day one of its establishment claimed to be a heaven for
the poor and needy, it’s the poor who suffer the most under its rule, causing
the rise of the super-rich and the dirt-poor classes among the Iranian society.

Iran's
constitution considers education until the end of high school a basic right
that should be provided for free. In practice, however, public schools have
lost all their credibility and quality.

In
an article published on August 11, Javan newspaper, close to the
terrorist-designated Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), digs into the
so-called privatization of education.

“This
drive was launched years ago and is resulting now in a situation where there
isn’t even a single student from public schools from the top candidates of
university entrance examinations. Eighty seven percent of the top candidates in
the nation-wide university entrance exams were from private schools while the
remaining 13 percent were students from competitive public schools,” the piece
explains.

Competitive
public schools, or as they’re called in Iran, exemplary public schools, are
funded by the government. However, these schools have very difficult entrance
examinations that exclude the vast majority of the country’s students.

Javan
newspaper then concludes, “This shows that moving along the path of privatizing
a task that should be done by the government, has resulted in a situation where
poorer families don’t have the ability to send their children to private
schools or competitive public schools. Since the quality of education in normal
public schools is low and there is no justice of education in the country, they
are deprived of the opportunity to enter good universities and rise in higher
education. This leads to an increase in social injustice.”

Mohammadreza
Vaez Mahdavi, an adviser to the Minister of Cooperatives, Labor and Social
Welfare, acknowledges that “more than nine percent of Iranian families have to
sell their furniture and home appliances due to the fact that they cannot pay
for education with their normal income.”

The
Siasat-e Rooz newspaper wrote on August 9: “The inequality in education
expenses between the families in the top decile and the bottom decile is one to
53. This means that the richest ten percent expend for their children's
education 53 times more than the poorest ten percent.”

“The
top individuals in entrance examinations (for universities) are from special,
non-public schools,” the article continues, adding that “this is a warning
about the unequal state of the country’s education system where now universities
and higher education also become privileges for the society’s special groups.”

Being
close to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s faction, Siasat-e Rooz seeks to
exonerate the entire regime and place the blame specifically on the government
of Iranian regime of President Hassan Rouhani. The “quest to decrease the costs
of education has targeted public schools, reproducing education inequality,” it
adds.

The
Tasnim news agency, close to the IRGC Quds Force, another terrorist-designated
entity of Iran’s regime, interviews an assistant professor at the Allameh
University on this subject.

“Recently,
UNESCO has advised governments to dedicate four to six percent of the gross
domestic product and 15 to 20 percent of their budgets to public education. In
Iran, however, only 1.5 to 2 percent of the GDP, and ten percent of the public
budget are allocated to education.”

Tasnim
also writes that in rich countries, only 18 percent of children’s education
costs are paid by parents. In Iran under the mullahs’ rule, families have to
cover around 33 percent of their children’s education costs.